Free Republic

Some interesting items turned up at the Baltimore gun “buy back”.  “Buy back” is an Orwellian propaganda term. You cannot “buy back things you never owned. At the event, someone turned in an expended AT4 trainer. From saab.com:  All AT4 weapons are single shot and fully disposable. You simply aim, fire, destroy the target and discard the empty tube. Furthermore, the AT4 family has proven itself to be a highly reliable, robust and durable weapon system that has been extensively proven in combat. Its key characteristics include high target effect and hit probability – creating a high target kill...

Four homemade submachine guns found during a drug raid in Waterloo, Australia. Imager from twitter.com/7newssydney: When extreme restrictions are placed on the acquisition of legal firearms, one of the easiest repeaters to make at home or in small workshops is the submachine gun. The four homemade submachine guns shown above were discovered with a number of other firearms, drugs, and 2.75 million Australian dollars, about two million in U.S. dollars. From facebook.com/nswpoliceforce: Acting on information received, Strike Force Raptor, assisted by the Drug and Firearms Squad, executed a search warrant a storage facility at Waterloo in the early hours...

On Jan. 29, 1945, First Sgt. Leonard Funk, Jr. faced a determined German army officer ready to kill him with a pistol. Armed with a Thompson M1A1 submachine gun, the U.S. Army paratrooper had just led an assault against 15 houses occupied by German troops in Holzheim, Belgium. It was part of an operation by the 82nd Airborne Division to clear German soldiers from the area following the Battle of the Bulge. Leading a makeshift headquarters platoon of clerks, Funk and his unit captured 30 prisoners. He left them with several dozen more prisoners—under guard—and returned to the fight. While...

For nearly 30 years, soldiers heard an unforgettable sound coming from a weapon firing from behind the rubble in Stalingrad. Or echoing in the frozen hills of the Korean Peninsula during human-wave attacks. Or even rattling the jungles of Vietnam during firefights with the Viet Cong. BRRAP-PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP! Before the AK-47 became the symbol of Soviet armed forces, there was the “burp gun”—officially, the PPSh-41. It’s an ugly gun that makes an ugly sound during extended fire. Looks aside, the burp gun sure did work.

Few weapons in the modern era ever had a poem penned its honor. But few weapons were ever like the Sten gun. Hastily contrived in the early, desperate days of World War II, it looked like a last-ditch effort to arm British troops—and it was. Terrified Britons knew they did not have enough weapons to repel a German invasion force. The British lost thousands of small arms that were destroyed or simply abandoned after the devastating rout at Dunkirk.

Born out of the necessity rapidly to put inexpensive submachine guns in the hands of American soldiers and Marines, it was so cheap it looked like a mechanic’s tool rather than the product of advanced American industrial know-how. It was supposed to serve as a replacement to the iconic and expensive Thompson submachine gun, but developed a reputation of its own that kept it in the U.S. military inventory from World War II all the way through Desert Storm. Nobody really loved the M-3 that G.I.s dubbed the “Grease Gun.” But nobody really hated, either.